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Re: [SLUG] Re: An almost-hosed Linux system

To: Sydney Linux Users Group <slug@xxxxxxxxxxx>

Subject: Re: [SLUG] Re: An almost-hosed Linux system

From: lukekendall@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2006 00:46:43 +1000 (EST)

On 28 Aug, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> > True, but I saw a reference to lilo trying each device in event of
> > failure. Certainly I've had a drive drop out of a raid set under lilo and
> > the system booted up just fine.
>
> Well, remember that LILO is pretty dumb. LILO installs itself on the boot
> sector of both devices (or partitions), so when the boot device fails to
> boot, and the BIOS falls back to the next device, it's the *second* LILO
> that gets to make the choices about how it boots... and it's running on a
> functional disk, remember. :-)
Ah! That sounds much more plausible!
BTW, the procedure seems to be working - it booted up the root
filesystem from the new Ubuntu on md0; then complained about md2 with
the same problem.
md2 is /home in my setup, so I'm currently waiting for that raid array
to rebuild itself before I mke2fs -j that one too, copy the data
back, and proceed with the reboot...
Well, it's 30 mins later, and all worked well. The system is now back
up and running with the newer Ubuntu 6.06 (rather than the older
un-configured Ubuntu 6.06), booting off the raid mirror and with /home
also mirrored.
Thanks again, Jeff (and Matt) for your advice.
Final step is to test that it's really working as a mirror by disabling
each of the drives, but I think I'll leave that until my next chunk of
spare time.
luke